iOS 13 Wish List for Apple

2018-11-131394Posted by 3uTools

It’s a huge improvement over iOS 11’s problematic rollout. iOS 12 seems primarily geared at smoothing out long-standing pain points. But Apple can do more, much more. With that in mind, here are some of the things I hope to see in iOS 13.

Keep it fast, but drop support for the oldest devices

It’s impressive that you can run iOS 12 on everything going back to the iPhone 5s and iPad mini 2, but those devices have only 1GB of RAM. The features Apple can add with a higher minimum RAM spec are probably well worth the tradeoff.

Notifications syncing

If you have an iPhone, iPad, and a Mac, you’ll find you often get notified about the same thing on all of them. Apple should allow notification status to sync through iCloud. If I dismiss a notification on my iPhone, that same notification should be gone the next time I pick up my iPad.

A new home screen

There hasn’t been a significant update to the iOS home screen since iOS 7, more or less. Now that iPhones are different—bigger, with a taller and narrower aspect ratio, and a Notch, and no Home button—maybe it’s time to re-think the entire home screen.

But the icons could look different. Perhaps they could even be dynamic—if not animated, then able to display different icons to match different states of the app. Or at least, one icon for Light Mode and one for Dark Mode (because we will finally get Dark Mode, right?).

ios 12 camera

Maybe time to rethink the entire Apple camera interface. It’s simple and intuitive, but it feels as though Apple has had the same Camera app for years and just keeps adding stuff onto it.

In particular, it would be great to see more options for enthusiasts to control settings from within the app, even if only in a “Pro” tab. Let us control frame rate and resolution of video recording without jumping into the Settings app. Give us control over white balance, ISO, and shutter speed.

Always-on display

Now that Apple has three iPhones with OLED displays, it makes sense to give them an always-on display. For iOS 13, we would be happy with a “phase one” always-on display: Just show us the clock, any upcoming calendar appointments or reminders, the weather, and maybe a simplified representation of the most recent notifications.

Dark Mode

Adding Dark Mode to iOS just makes sense, and not just because users have been clamoring for it for years. Apple is deep into a project to make it easy to port iOS apps to the Mac by adding support for UIKit—the iOS interface development framework— to macOS Mojave.

A smarter Siri

Siri needs better voice recognition, faster response times, and more “fun” activities like trivia and games. It needs to give more accurate answers to a much broader set of questions. Most of all, SiriKit needs a major expansion into new Domains like music and shopping

How is this volume popup still a thing?

Adjust your iPhone or iPad volume, and a big fat overlay takes up the whole middle of the screen. It’s an overwhelming interface convention for a feature that many people use multiple times a day.

Support YouTube 4K and HDR video

Apple, Google, and many others are hard at work on the royalty-free AV1 codec to supersede both HEVC and VP9, but it’s going to be awhile until that’s commonplace. In the meantime, iPhone and iPad users are missing out on what is almost certainly the largest repository of 4K video content on the internet. Swallow your pride, Apple, and support VP9 (or at least, let Google do so in their YouTube app).